Love Is Something Heavy: Read Our Interview With Multimedia Artist Sara Rahbar Before Her Presentation of New Work During the NADA Art Fair →

Sara Rahbar is an artist who bravely transverses borders and permeates boundaries. Though often labeled an “Iranian American artist” (her family fled Iran in 1982 during the beginning of the Revolution), she prefers to relocate herself in a collective humanity. Transcending genre, her work ranges from photography and paint to textiles and sculpture. Rahbar’s work reflects this permeability, combining seemingly antithetical ideas – American flags sewn together with traditional Persian fabrics, hearts made out of military backpacks – in a beautiful and generative juxtaposition. Click here to read more. 

Nick Waplington "A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty" @ These Days Gallery In Los Angeles

These Days and Thomas Solomon Art Advisory present A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty, an exhibition of paintings by Nick Waplington. Over the last thirty years Waplington has developed an extensive body of work marked by eclecticism and juxtaposition. While best known as a photographer, Waplington also works extensively with painting, video, computer-generated imagery, sculpture, and found material.  Over the past year Waplington has been living in Los Angeles, devoting his art practice entirely to painting. This show features a number of large semi-abstract canvases rendering the city’s urban psycho-geography as well as its light and landscape. Once again, his work explores themes of chaos and volatility on a number of levels; in these paintings, Waplington evokes the constantly changing light and weather of Southern California in a time of climate instability, the city’s fragile existence on the edge of the San Andreas fault, and the desperate existence of the many men and women living precarious lives on the fringes of Los Angeles’s prosperity. Click here to read our interview with Nick Waplington. A Display of Panic at a Moment of Absolute Certainty will be on view until June 5, 2016 at These Days, 118 Winston Street, 2nd FL Los Angeles, CA

Chaos Theory: An Interview With The Legendary Nick Waplington On Photography, Painting, Skate Culture and the West Bank →

Talking with photographer and painter Nick Waplington is akin to viewing and pondering his work. There is a lot of information to sort through. But if you can find some order in the onslaught of ideas, or the “chaos” as he likes to call it, you will find a perspective wildly and almost enviably unique. The subjects of his conversation are as varied as those within his photographs and his paintings. While Waplington’s work has dealt with environmental concerns, rave culture, the creative processes and inner struggles of the late Alexander McQueen, and (as in his paintings) his own inner monologue, a 40-minute conversation with Waplington darts around discussions about his creative process, international politics, the contemporary art world and the business surrounding it, and even skateboarding. Click here to read more. 

James Georgopoulos "The Earth Is Flat" @ MAMA Gallery In Los Angeles

MAMA Gallery presents The Earth Is Flat, James Georgopoulos’ second solo exhibition at the gallery. Buoyed by four new video sculptures that the artist created out of found, fabricated, and handmade materials, The Earth Is Flat is an interrogation of artificial intelligence (AI) and the values and hazards implicit to autonomous computing. The artist‘s four sculptures themselves are superficially interconnected to insinuate that technology has inculcated itself as an indissoluble event in human history. James Georgopoulos "The Earth Is Flat" will be on view until June 11, 2016 at MAMA Gallery, 1242 Palmetto Street, Los Angeles, CA. 

Adam McEwen "Harvest" @ Petzel Gallery in New York

Harvest focuses on movement—of the eye, the body, of information—and constraints on that movement. The exhibition comprises three main elements: a pair of sculptures replicating the current model of IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, rendered in graphite (a material closely associated with McEwen’s practice); a large steel and wood staircase sculpture which takes the shape of the letter K; and a group of paintings printed on cellulose sponge, or kitchen sponge, showing interior images of the four tunnels leaving Manhattan. Harvest will be on view until April 30, 2016 at Petzel Gallery, 456 W 18th Street, New York

Sex, Guns and PTSD: Read Our Exclusive Interview With The Bonnie Parker of Photography Julia Fox →

I first met Julia Fox two years ago in Manhattan. As I scanned the floor trying to figure out how much longer I felt like subjecting myself to $20 drinks and if “operation get rich girlfriend” was going to become an actual reality, I noticed from the corner of my eye a gorgeous brunette with an hour glass figure draped in sparkly diamonds, controlling her little corner of the room. As I thought to myself, “who the hell is this chic,” I immediately noticed her Man Ray tribute tattoo, inspired by his photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse with a violin grill superimposed on her back. I walked over, introduced myself, and immediately she informed me she was in the company of an African Prince. She filled my glass with expensive champagne and for whatever reason we discussed abortions, which offered an amazing and entertaining five minutes. Click here to read more. 

La Petite Mort: Read Our Interview With Artist Natalie Krim On The Female Orgasm, Her Work And Current Show In Los Angeles →

The first thing you notice when you meet Natalie Krim is her voice. She has the dialect and pitch of 1940s movie star and the demeanor too. It’s a cool glamour, a poised glamour that is as sharp as a razor blade. Perhaps the Hollywood lineage isn’t too far off – her grandfather was a Hollywood portrait photographer who shot everyone from ---- to ---. Her grandfather is also most likely where she gets her creative gene. Krim’s illustrations, which are highly erotic in nature in all manner of repose, self-pleasuring, orgiastic and mellifluously sensual, are feminine and delicate, like she is, but hint at darker overtones. They are a world all her own, alter-egos, characters from the unconscious, coquettish nymphs, desirous, wanting and wanton – they recall a world created by Henry Darger or the illustrations of Gustav Klimt. Before her current show on view now at Little Big Man Gallery, we got a chance to ask her a few questions about her work, sexuality and secrets. Click here to read more. 

Oliver Clegg "Life Is A Gasssss" @ Erin Cluley Gallery In Dallas, Texas

Exploring themes of change and resilience, Life Is a Gasssss will depict 20th century pop icons as an allusion to how the information overload of the 21st century has impacted visual culture. The cross-media selection of works will reflect the breadth of the artist’s practice. Click here to read our interview with the artist. Life Is a Gasssss will be on view until May 7, 2016 at Erin Cluley Gallery, 414 Fabrication Street, Dallas Texas

Paola Pivi "Ma'am" @ The Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, Texas

Paola Pivi’s first museum solo exhibition in the United States addresses the viewer as “ma’am.” Women, men, and children are greeted with this term of reverence and kindness along with its common, unintentional undertones of comedy and pretension. Ma’am brings together iconic past works with new commissions. Pivi’s feather-covered polar bears occupy the gallery in the company of an inverted Fiat G-91 fighter jet. Canvases of cascading real pearls converse with photographs of zebras on a snowy mountaintop. Spinning, feather-dressed wheels evoke dream catchers, while a giant inflatable ladder elicts wonder and aspiration. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Dan Colen "Oil Painting" @ Dallas Contemporary in Dallas, Texas

Dan Colen "Oil Painting" provides an unprecedented opportunity to track the major developments in the artist’s practice, beginning with his earliest works and continuing through his most recent. For the first time, viewers will be offered new insights into those developments through never-before exhibited preparatory drawings, source material, studies, and experimental paintings from the artist’s studio. The exhibition includes several pieces from 2001, the year Colen graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and began working toward his first gallery exhibition. Photographs and graphite-on-velum pieces from that year reveal Colen’s longstanding interest in and mastery of traditional painting—a practice that is explored, exploded, and returned to throughout the works that follow. This is particularly evident in several examples of his well-known “Candle Paintings”, which are paired with a suite of drawings that map the artist’s process, laying bare Colen’s attention to detail and composition. Additional paintings in the exhibition represent several of Colen’s major series, including Confetti, Trash, and Miracle paintings. Four large-scale Trash paintings, all made in 2016, show Colen’s newest painterly intervention into the pictorial plane—using detritus discovered on New York City streets as sculptural painting materials. Dan Colen "Oil Painting" will be on view until August 21, 2016 at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass Street Dallas, Texas